Mate's MCP server is gone, and the numbers say that's fine

symfony/ai 0.13 shipped today, my first release as a core team member. The headline change for Mate is PR #2380: Mate drops its MCP server entirely and becomes a plain CLI with a discovery layer on top. That change only became practical because Mate’s skill lifecycle, started in 0.12 and reworked here, lets skills be discovered, installed and kept as part of the project’s agent context instead of just existing somewhere in a package. In a controlled test, the bare CLI was invoked 0 times in 30 runs. It was installed and working, but nothing told the agent it existed. Add the file-based discovery layer and five new skills, and the resulting setup performed about as well as the old MCP server. The transport wasn’t what decided whether Mate worked. Whether the agent could discover the right command was.